Reviews and News about British, European and Translated crime fiction, tv and film.

Sunday, June 01, 2008

International Dagger Shortlist speculation...

The shortlist for the Duncan Lawrie International Dagger award (and the other awards) will be announced on Tuesday night. I'm particularly interested in the International Dagger as it's the only Dagger award for which translated crime novels are eligible. The criteria are:

Eligible books must be crime novels by the broadest definition including thrillers, suspense novels and spy fiction as long as the book was not originally written in English and has been translated into English for UK publication between June 1 2007 and May 31 2008 with a closing date for entries of 17 April 2008. After November 1 2007, titles submitted more than 30 days after publication date may be excluded.

From my database, I believe the following titles to be eligible. There will no doubt be some I have missed. I have included the non European books that I know about (links are to Euro Crime reviews):

Interesting ...The five books on the short list are all in your long list, but beyond that I cannot say till the list is published on Tuesday evening.

An innovation this year is that we will be running a forum where you can discuss the shortlist, in the run-up to the announcement of the winner. Check out the CWA website for more details, from around 10pm Tuesday evening. Your comments will be most welcome.

How nice of Roger to drop by with a comment and to let us know that they are in your long list!

I've chosen six that I have read, but I am aware that some in the list which I haven't read yet have been said to be brilliant, so I am quite happy to believe that my list does not reflect the "best" of your long list -- just the ones that I've read that I've enjoyed the most. (If I could have 7 I would include The Blood Spilt by A Larsson).Thanks for putting this together, Karen!

I browsed Last Rituals yesterday evening, and this turned into reading it - putting the current read to one side. I read it during the night when I couldn't sleep. Currently a quarter of the way in and it's a cracker. I hope it makes the list.

Notwithstanding the broaddefinition of crime novel for thisprize.--I cannot see that 2 ofthe eligible list fall under this category. Henning Mankell--The Eye of the Leopard. Klas Ostergren--Gentlemen Further--I have just finished Karin Fossum--Broken. This is a challenging novel- with serious literary pretensions- beautifully written by the poet that Fossum is--but it certainly does not come under the category of crime or mystery novel.